Visualizing social inequality and the Czech status attainment model

Research in social stratification – analyses of educational inequality, social mobility, occupational attainment and many other important topics – often involve advanced estimation methods that are challenging to communicate to non-sociologists, and particularly lay audiences. This seminar will introduce a new way of communicating social stratification processes in the Czech Republic in a format that lay audiences can easily understand, namely by utilizing new data visualization tools that display animated, dynamics graphical relationships of several variables at a time. While the use of animated graphics for depicting scientific data has been popularized by the New York Times and other major news organizations, the overall approach can also be used by Czech sociologists by building upon the javascript libraries of data-driven documents currently available online and through collaboration with software designers. In this seminar, examples of newly developed animated flow charts of educational mobility, class mobility, and income mobility based on data from the Czech Household Panel Study will be provided. We will discuss how to use and interpret these charts, how they can be customized by users in real-time to display or emphasize relationships of interest, and how they can be used to transform the way sociologists communicate their research to Czech media organizations and to increase attention to their research. The animated flow charts presented in the seminar are based on a new scientific paper focused on using Czech Household Panel Study data to re-examine traditional structural models of occupational status attainment. Therefore, the key findings of that research will also be presented, above all in terms of the consistency and inconsistency of those findings with the basic understanding of social stratification processes lay audiences would receive from the animated mobility flow charts.

Michael Smith is a Researcher at the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (CERGE-EI). For many years he held similar research positions at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (ISEA), where he also served as Chairman. He received B.A. degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle (1998), M.A. from Boston College (2000), and PhD (2008) from the New School for Social Research in New York.

http://www.michaelsmith.cz/

Seminar will be held in English. No registration is needed.